Father’s Day is just around the corner, but the nation’s marketers won’t be pushing you to shop for Dear Old Dad the way they typically do for Mom on Mother’s Day. The 54-year-old holiday — first made official by the Nixon administration in 1972 — has become hopelessly passé. It’s a relic of a time when the vast majority of American homes enjoyed a loving paterfamilias at their helm. Today, a growing share of American families, about 30%, have a single parent in charge. Among African-Americans, the fatherless rate, near 60%, is astounding. The negative social outcomes that flow from this condition are well documented but too often ignored.
Families with unattached mothers earn, on average, one-third the income of two-parent homes. Fatherless children are four times more likely to be poor and twice as likely to drop out of school and end up in jail. These trends are getting worse by the year.
Some outcomes are even more horrific. Consider, for example, the rise in mass shootings. Has anyone noticed that nearly all of the killers — close to 90%, according to some earlier studies — come from fatherless homes? And what about suicides? Black youth, whose suicide rates are spiking, are less likely to have fathers to turn to as mentors, role models, and protectors from bullies, either online or in their neighborhoods. Young girls with the highest rate of fatherlessness also have the highest suicide rates, statistics show. This is unacceptable.
In the short term, we do need to shore up our beleaguered single-parent families. “Co-parenting” strategies give broken couples an incentive to stay engaged. And fortunately, many fatherless children still have access to father surrogates of various kinds — uncles, older brothers, and cousins — some of them “fictive kin,” yet still a source of solace. But it’s not enough. Conservative nostalgia for “Father Knows Best,” while understandable given the current crisis, won’t really help us. Instead, we need to reimagine fathering in a way that suits our rapidly evolving, multi-gendered world.
But you rarely hear about the virtues of “benevolent paternalism” anymore.
The mass media is also partly to blame. In too many of today’s TV sitcoms or dramas, fathers are portrayed as bumbling and ineffective — or worse. In the hit series “Californication,” David Duchovny was a philandering writer who bedded down a 16-year-old and regularly got into fistfights. The father in the popular sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle” was an awkward ne’er-do-well. In the “Sopranos,” the main father figure was an angst-ridden psychopath.
Conservative nostalgia for “Father Knows Best,” while understandable given the current crisis, won’t really help us. Instead, we need to reimagine fathering in a way that suits our rapidly evolving, multi-gendered world. It won’t be easy.
More vocal national leadership is needed. President Obama famously called attention to fatherlessness, but in keeping with current attitudes, he seemed to suggest that the onus for change rested on traditional heterosexual men alone (they should “man up,” he implied). Biden all but ignored the issue, preferring to herald the rights of gender minorities.
President Trump, who bemoans the nation’s cultural decline, should go a step further. He could name a blue-ribbon commission to study the trend of fatherlessness and recommend more comprehensive gender-inclusive solutions. The commission should be bipartisan and all gender stakeholders — men and women, gay and straight — should be included in these discussions.
But what’s really needed is grassroots action. People in their local communities should raise up their fathers. Gift-giving in the privacy of the home or a family dinner is only a start. Schools and churches can plan special Father’s Day events and involve the entire community. Mothers and their children can speak publicly about the positive role their husbands, fathers, or grandfathers have played in their lives.
I can already hear the objections: Celebrate fatherhood and not motherhood? Of course not, but our society is way out of balance in its treatment of men and women and gender issues generally. While younger single women love to rail against “patriarchy,” implying that men are to blame for most societal ills, many older (especially married) women know intuitively that the current climate of gender invective is doing nothing to advance the cause of social equality. It’s actually driving many men to retreat even further from constructive engagement.
Isn’t it time for the silent female majority to say so, unequivocally?
Celebrating men isn’t a call for renewed male dominance; it’s a plea for greater gender cohesion and harmony. Men and women do not always share the burdens of life equally; we know this, intuitively, for women. But men still account for 90% of all workplace injuries and fatalities; they work the most physically grueling and dangerous jobs; and in 2020-2021, they suffered disproportionately the effects of COVID. They were 46% more likely to be admitted to the ICU due to COVID-19 complications and 45% more likely to die from complications than women. The rates were even higher for men older than 50.
A still-traumatized nation emerging from the ravages of a devastating pandemic can ill-afford the gender polemics that rage so freely in America today. Our children, especially, are counting on loving paternal figures to help forge a pathway out of the darkness. That’s a form of male “privilege” that everyone should freely embrace.
